Monthly Archives: December 2009

In the wake of the miraculously failed Christmas day Jihadi attack over the skies of Detroit, we are starting to see our governmental mechanisms crank into gear to institute policies to prevent terrorists from attacking us successfully.

Never mind that it was that very governmental bureaucracy which enabled the Jihadists to penetrate secure areas with explosives and come close to killing 270 people on Christmas day. It was our incompetent governmental bureaucracies which granted a known Jihadi a visa to enter the United States. It was our governmental bureaucracies which let him get on an airliner without a passport. It was our governmental bureaucracies which failed to recognize classic warning signs: ticket paid for in cash, no checked luggage.

Nevertheless, Janet Napolitano, who is evidently conflicted between whether the security system worked like clockwork or failed miserably, has had her department of Homeland Security see to it that no one stands up for the last hour of any flight (an order which has evidently already been rescinded) and Transportation Security personnel are redoubling efforts to tighten access to airliners.

Meanwhile, President Obama managed to tear himself from the links to declare the terrorist an “isolated extremist,” perhaps the worst mischaracterization made by a sitting president since Richard Nixon declared himself “not a crook.” Obama then promised a dragnet to find those responsible. What complete and utter hogwash.

This security and law enforcement approach used against those who are at war with us will never work.

We can button up airliners tighter than a drum and do body cavity searches of passengers and you know what will happen?

The Jihadists will drive a truck loaded with TNT through the front door of the terminal at a major airport the day before Thanksgiving and kill hundreds.

Or they’ll target subways and trains like they did in Madrid, London and Paris.

Or they’ll target shopping malls or schools.

Until we realize that this is a war and not a law enforcement problem and that these terrorists have a common thread, whether they are lone wolves or part of cells, it will keep getting worse.

The problem is Islam. Not Muslims, but Islam as practiced by a core of Muslims who largely control the Islamic world. Their goal is to implement sharia law. Their goal is not for you and me to convert to Islam, but to impose sharia on us. That is what they are fighting for and sharia is their doctrine as well. We ignore this at our peril. The reason for everything they do can be looked up in books that they wrote. Not just the Noble Quran, but books like “Reliance of the Traveler” and “Milestones” and “The Quranic Concept of War.” If you really want to understand where the enemy is coming from, buy these books on Amazon and read them.

There is a global Jihadist insurgency and insurgencies are 80% political/ideological not military. We can win the military side. But we aren’t even fighting the other 80%. And that’s what manufactures guys like this Nigerian, who was, like most Jihadist terrorists, wealthy and educated, even privileged. (This is NOT about poverty; don’t let anyone tell you that.)

The Jihadis are indoctrinated for years in mosques and madrassas. They don’t go “radical” by accident. It is a system. Go to the MEMRI web site and take a look at state-run television in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Palestinian territories and even Egypt. You will be shocked at what you see and hear, especially on the programs targeted at children. Jihadis are not born. They are created. Furthermore, they aren’t created because the USA supports Israel or because the USA overthrew Saddam Hussein in Iraq or the Taliban in Afghanistan. Their agenda is much wider, longer and deeper than that.

The Jihadists did not slaughter hundreds of school children in Beslan, Russia because the USA supports Israel or because US troops are in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Jihadists killed 241 US servicemen in Beirut in 1983, blew up the World Trade Center in 1993, blew up a USAF barracks in 1995, blasted our embassies in east Africa in 1998, attacked the USS Cole in 2000 and flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th 2001 before a single American soldier or Marine set foot in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Jihadists didn’t kill 200 Australian tourists in Bali, Indonesia because the US supports Israel. They didn’t slaughter dozens in Mumbai, India because the US is in Iraq. They aren’t killing people in southern Thailand because the US is in Afghanistan. And the Islamic insurgency in the Philippines predates all of this.

There must be something else at work.

It’s called Jihad.

You can expect some type of Jihadist incident involving Americans to be in the news every week from now on. Some incidents will be violent Jihad like Fort Hood and Flight 253. Others will be civilizational or “stealth” jihad, such as refusing to allow bomb-sniffing dogs near Muslims based on some notion of religious “freedom.” This is the environment that fighting a politically correct war for 8 years has created. Get used to it.

Let me give you an example of what we’re up against. The best example is Saudi Arabia. Some in the US refer to the Sauds as “allies” in the “war on terrorism.” But if the Sauds are really at war with Al Qaeda and the Jihadists, then why don’t we hear about lots of attempts on the lives of Saudi princes (and there are thousands of Saudi princes)? They are not hard to find. Go to a casino or disco in London or Monte Carlo and you can find them and often without tight security. Since Al Qaeda was founded in 1989, the number of Saudi royals killed by their terrorism stands at 0. In that time, there was only a single documented attempt by an Al Qaeda terrorist on a Saudi prince, who just happened to be the minister of the Interior, in charge of a large portion of security forces.

In Saudi Arabia when you are caught shoplifting, under their Sharia law, you have a good chance of getting your hand chopped off as punishment. A woman gets 100 lashes for the crime of adultery. The Sauds behead people for more serious crimes.

Yet, when a Saudi is caught on the battlefield as a member of Al Qaeda by US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan and is turned over to the Sauds, what happens to them?

They are sent to rehab. In rehab they are issued crayons and paint for art therapy. (I am not joking.) After rehab, they are released.

Why do you suppose this is?

I’ll tell you why. Because they haven’t committed a crime as far as the Sauds are concerned. Shoplifting gets your hand chopped off, Jihad doesn’t even get you a slap on the wrist.

Does anyone still believe that the Sauds are our allies?

The Jihadists get funded, they get trained and they get granted safe haven. This happens a number of ways and from a number of sources and we need to go after them. Use our strengths to go after the ideological and financial and training sources. Until we do, expect this to get worse and worse. Taking our shoes off before getting on the airplane isn’t going to help one damn bit.

What if Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had succeeded in detonating his bomb and had brought down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas day?

There are a few things we know:

1. Some 300 innocent people on board the airliner–passengers and crew–would have perished.

2. The fact that Abdulmutallab had waited until the aircraft was on approach very possibly meant that it was flying over a populated area at the time. This was almost certainly planned. Had he detonated the device over the Atlantic Ocean, it would have killed everyone on board, but there would have been no TV video footage of the carnage and the possibility of additional innocent victims on the ground would have been eliminated. Had Abdulmutallab succeeded in blowing open the fuselage of the Airbus airliner, it could very easily have come down in whole or in parts over homes and more people would have been killed.

The only thing that prevented Christmas 2009 from becoming the most infamous in US history was either Abdulmutallab’s incompetence or faulty explosive equipment.

But there is one other thing that we can be almost certain of had Abdulmutallab succeeded in blowing up that airplane: today, 28 December 2009, 3 days later, members of the news media would be reading press releases from the White House, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI declaring that there is “no indication of terrorist involvement.”

Janet Napolitano, the same woman who would have us believe that our security “system worked like clockwork” in this attack, would be on our television screens with the comforting words that “there is no evidence that this tragedy was a terrorist attack.”

Ill-fated Flight 253 would have been reported as a “crash.”

Would the NTSB and FBI have eventually determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that a bomb brought down 253? Probably. But that would have been months after the fact and critics would have debated the evidence any way.

Meanwhile, the breakdowns which allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to get on board Flight 253 with a US visa may never have been identified and fixed…

By now everyone knows about the attempt by a Jihadist from Nigeria to set off a bomb in an airliner above Detroit. But what many of us may not have been aware of is the fact that our nation’s transportation security systems worked just fine to prevent the terrorist from completing his Islamikaze mission. Or so says already-disgraced Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano:

This is just the latest in a series of incredibly stupid policies and mistakes made by this woman since she took office. It began with the report issued by DHS and approved by her which labeled just about every segment of our society, OTHER than the Islamic community, as potential terrorist threats–ESPECIALLY returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

Then, as the Fort Hood massacre made news, it was discovered that our intrepid Secretary of HOMELAND Security was attending a women’s conference in the United Arab Emirates of all places…

But those two gaffs pale in comparison to her assessment of this latest attempted Islamikaze attack.

There are so many glaring errors in the short Associated Press news article linked above that it boggles the mind:

quote:

1. “Homeland security head: The security system worked”

Nothing authorities did prevented that plane from being blown up. This was a case of a bad guy fumbling the ball on the one yard line through the end zone for a touchback. If the security system worked, then the system STINKS. Either Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab’s detonator was bad or else it was a case of “you need to be smarter than the equipment you’re using” and he screwed up. But if not for their screw-up, we’d have had a US airliner blown up and crashing over a populated area on Christmas with hundreds killed.

quote:

2. “The father of the man accused of attempting to blow up the jetliner told U.S. officials in Nigeria he was concerned about his son’s extreme religious views. However, Napolitano says there was no specific information to place Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on a no-fly list.”

This is a byproduct of refusing to recognize the religious component integral to the enemies we face. The fact that the father informed us that his son was a Jihadi wasn’t enough for our PC system to keep him out of the US. This is the modern-day equivalent to allowing members of the SS into America because their membership in the SS was not sufficient specific information to exclude them.

quote:

3. Napolitano says that within 60 to 90 minutes of the incident all 120 flights that were in the air at time were contacted to make sure the attempted bombing did not extend beyond the flight to Detroit.

How the hell were those other air crews supposed to know? Did they announce over the intercom,”Any terrorists on board with an explosive device strapped to your crotch, please raise your hand”?

The fact of the matter is, we were caught with our pants down and we are just damn lucky that Christmas 2009 wasn’t marked forever by an Islamikaze massacre.

Someone better figure a way to get this Napolitano woman out of office and out of the security business altogether before she gets a lot of Americans killed.

The Jihadist terrorist convicted in the Lockerbie Pan Am 103 bombing who was released by the British government on “humanitarian” grounds earlier this year had 1.8 million British pounds stashed away in a Swiss bank account.

The Chicago man charged with helping plot the terror attacks one year ago in Mumbai also photographed and conducted surveillance of a nuclear weapons fuel plant in Tromboy, India, according to Indian and U.S. law enforcement authorities.

The Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which is a Muslim Brotherhood front group that has been tied in documented reports to HAMAS and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, is now calling for leniency by the Feds in prosecuting 5 American Muslims who traveled to Pakistan to join the Jihad and receive terrorism training.

Since September 11th 2001, Americans have been understandably apprehensive when it comes to airline safety, particularly when it comes to the behavior of passengers.

Many TTB readers may be aware of recent reports about what could have been a possible “dry run” on an AirTran airlines flight.

Over on American Thinker, John Leonard has done an excellent job of covering the reports circulating about that episode. Today, however, he took it a step further and provided a chronology of disturbing incidents on airliners which have not received enough attention. We urge our readers to view his latest work: “Terror Test Runs on Airlines?”

In an editorial column published on 18 December, the editors of The Toledo Blade point out that capturing or killing Osama Bin Laden would not defeat Al Qaeda and capturing or killing Mullah Omar would not defeat the Taliban.

The fact of the matter is, Al Qaeda and the Taliban could cease to exist tomorrow and the U.S. and Western civilization would still face a Jihadist threat. This overall war–which we at TTB believe should be properly called World War IV–goes way beyond Al Qaeda.

Already, there are spin-offs of Al Qaeda in the Asia-Pacific Region, Southwest Asia, North Africa, Europe and the U.S. These are loosely formed groups which are inspired by Al Qaeda and model themselves in some way off of Al Qaeda, but are not operationally attached to Al Qaeda in the classic sense. Bin Laden and Zawahiri don’t command them and those two Jihadi leaders could be vaporized by a JDAM tomorrow and the global offshoots would still exist.

(Incidentally, we believe that Osama Bin Laden is dead and has been for some time. More on that in a future posting.)

The Jihad extends beyond Al Qaeda as well. When the Jihadist terrorists attacked Mumbai in November of 2008, it was automatically assumed that they were Al Qaeda. When it was surmised that they were in fact Lashkar-e-Taiba, that organization was labeled as an Al Qaeda affiliate.

Now, it turns out that, while both Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba are both Salafist Jihadist terrorist organizations and ideological allies, they are separate groups. One could be wiped off the face of the earth this afternoon and the other would still be waging Jihad.

Then there is the whole issue of Jihadist groups who are certainly NOT part of Al Qaeda. Hezbollah is the prime example of this. Hezbollah is Shia and, while they have cooperated with Al Qaeda in the past, they are definitely not part of Al Qaeda. Moreover, Hezbollah is perhaps even more dangerous than Al Qaeda due to their backing from Iran and a robust infrastructure set up on every continent, with the possible exception of Antarctica.

The fact that some of these groups are not actively engaged in ongoing operations against the U.S. or the West on a day-to-day basis should not be construed to mean that they are somehow not waging Jihad against us.

On one of the laptop computers uncovered in the investigation of Lashkar-e-Taiba after the Mumbai attacks, it was discovered that the group had a global list of 320 possible targets for attack. And the recon man for the Mumbai attacks turns out to have been a guy from Chicago.

It has been falsely and widely stated that Hezbollah has not been engaged in operations against the U.S. since the late 1980s. They have. Not only did Hezbollah help Al Qaeda set up the two East Africa embassy bombings in 1998, but Hezbollah was extremely active in the Iraq insurgency. Senior Hezbollah operatives were captured by U.S. forces in Iraq in the past few years and Hezbollah fighters were killed by U.S. G.I.s right along with members of Al Sadr’s “Mahdi Army” in Iraq:

America is, unfortunately, largely in denial about the war we are in and that makes victory all the more elusive. Too many believe that “killing Bin Laden” will end it or that wiping out Al Qaeda will mean victory. This is simply untrue.

There is a global Jihad being waged against America and its allies. It is being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq to be sure. But it is also being waged in Israel, Algeria, Somalia, Sudan, Western Europe, Russia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, the Philippines, Central and South America and, yes, right here in North America.